This claim is that the human origin story has been presented as one of self-creation, in reactive opposition to the Genesis story in which human beings were made by something greater than themselves- and which is a basic truth about human origins and the human status.

It includes responses to posts in the topic "Dialog on Creationists read this"

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And for another thing the slide show misses the point about human origins; by ignoring the significance of our un-beastly apparent vulnerability. A much shorter slide show based on ecology could have told far more:

Slide 1 About 8 million years ago grasslands that used a new more efficient way of using the sun’s energy spread over much of Africa. Two types of primates appeared who were able to access the grasslands resources without paying too high a price to the grassland predators. These primates were several species of baboons and hominins.

Slide 2. Unlike baboons, the small canines of hominins from about 6 million years ago showed that they had replaced the last-resort defensive biting that make most primates dangerous to attack, with hand-weapon use. We don’t know exactly how they defended themselves but it was probably by using sticks to stop a predator, take the initiative from it and confuse it, and then use a large river stone to smash the predator’s skull. The hominins probably fought in groups, like some of their predators.

Slide 3. The more efficiently the hominins protected themselves the more grassland areas they could forage in, in smaller numbers, at times of day and seasons that suited their foraging. That efficiency depended on them being able to handle objects with the force, accuracy and speed equivalent to that of a biting hyena or of alternative prey like the baboons. The hominid genus of Australopiths were highly adapted into that efficiency, with bipedal gait so they could carry weapons while foraging, hands adapted to grasp sticks and stones and a long back to stand taller than a predator.

Slide 4. From about 3 million years ago the efficiency of the australopith stand-off defense was reliable enough for them to develop a hairless sweaty skin that was vulnerable to a bite or scratch, but enabled them to avoid being exhausted by their predators. Their skulls were already protected by the same habit and they were in a position to protect their young during a long period of helplessness. The path was clear for them to develop a larger brain needed for speech.

Slide 5. From about 2.5mya we see our own genus homo broken away from australopithecus and exploiting the opportunities for developing a larger brain and protecting slow-maturing infants. That trend ended about 120 000 years ago with an animal that could rapidly connect words into sentences together and rapidly make sense of sentences. We don’t know quite how this language faculty arose, but it may be connected to the fact that the brain centres of speech and hand control are close to each other, while the warning cries of primates come from the part of their brains that controls emotion.

Slide 6: The human faculty for speech enabled any amount of precise knowledge to be taught and shared between any number of people, enabling large societies to develop with cultures. On the downside, the human ability to counterattack other animals that are themselves prepared to fight, and for access to territorial resources, has led to an endless succession of wars of increasing destructiveness. The biological success of tool-making combined with language has made an imbalance in nature that threatens many other species and even the creative capacity of the planet.

You really think your fantasy deserves treatment on BBC?

If Darwin hadn’t found such a champion in T H Huxley, if Huxley hadn’t been associated with the new model London Universities, or if Darwin hadn’t existed at all only Wallace, or if the Anglican church hadn’t been in such a crisis around that time- then yes, something like what you call my fantasy would have deserved and got onto the BBC web site. A lot better thought out and expressed than the old shoe I cobbled together here. But in this universe, to answer your question, No. The BBC only puts up origin stories that British society has well chewed over. And that’s how it should be.

I put up that 6 slide text to contradict Tolman’s notion that the 15 slide BBC show necessarily was too short to give a “holistic” picture.

I recognise all the words separately but what are you actually saying here, in English please?

What is this atheist ideology you speak of? I'm an atheist because I don't believe god/s exist............and that's pretty much my atheist ideology in a can. You want to discuss origins of man, you're dealing with anthropology and its numerous offshoots, not atheism.

The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.Mark Twain

tolman wrote:It's only in religious or pseudo-religious contexts that there is a desperate need in some people to believe in 'creation'.

Maybe so, but that need in some to believe in creation has produced in others a reactive tendency to tell the same story as mere change.

No doubt a committed believer in Thunder Gods could try and pretend to themselves that nasty atheist physicists are ideologically committed to explaining thunder and lightning as 'mere' physical phenomena.

The thing is, outside the self-centred wishful thinking of the creationist, there is nothing other than natural change (if 'natural' is taken to include our own species' effects).

It's the creationist who sees natural change as being somehow emotionally insufficient, but there's no more reason for science to try and pander to such feelings than for it to pander to the feelings of believers in Thunder Gods.

If 'mere' reality isn't good enough for some emotional and intellectual children, that's not really science's problem.

Science’s problem is that atheist ideology has been using the framework of Darwinian evolution to build an origin story of self creation when the reality is that we have been made by agency greater than ourselves. A problem that makes for all mankind and all life on this planet is that that part of the creative agency that is immediately above our status can be hurt, so killing us or what is worse, it might destroy creativity on Earth and turn it permanently into a slave planet. The self-creation origin story blinds its believers to the very existence of this creative agent.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The BBC slide show set out to explain how the supposedly “bizarre” human species came into being.

In fifteen short paragraphs, it was giving a brief look at some selected genetic differences between humans and their ancestors and living close relatives.

It simply wasn't claiming to be a comprehensive and holistic description of human evolution, and it seems only a moron would think or claim that it was.

FFS, the wikipedia page on 'human evolution' is around ten times the size.

If you added the Wikipedia entries on australopithecus, Oldown culture and so on, you could easily get 100 times the length of that slide show. But I showed that one could present a holistic* story in a slide show half as long.

"Fuck Sake" would have noticed that I was giving the actual question the slide show posed: How did such a bizarre creature evolve?. The question “How” does actually imply a holistic answer- not necessarily exhaustive. Like Thomas Eshuis, you are trying to make out that the slide show had restricted what it asked but actually it restricted its answer.

*Holism: a term introduced by General the Right Hon. Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926, in his book Holism and Evolution

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s technically your fantasy that an “actual atheist” would present a highly ecology-heavy view of human evolution”. You need to point to such a critter doing that.

I simply point out that just as you search around looking for things you can pretend are evidence for your imaginary ideology, a dishonest creationist could just as easily select the writings of atheist ecologists and claim that their 'excessive concentration' on special interactions was a deliberate atheist reaction diametrically opposing the biblical account of man being a different and superior created being.

Sure, it would be pathetic, and hopelessly intellectually dishonest, but no more so than what you are doing.

Basically, pretty much any scientific account of nature is going to displease intellectual children who want to cling to religious or similar fairy stories.I'm sure one could choose all manner of world religions or pseudo-scientific views of nature and find within them people who think 'science' is out to get them as a result of 'science' not saying what they want it to say, whether or not 'science' had even heard of their stories, let alone considered them as meriting the slightest attention.

You are still speaking without practical example about an imaginary atheist ecologist and an imaginary response from an imaginary creationist. And yet you “are sure one could choose all manner” of something else. What I am doing is practical criticism: drawing particular conclusions from particular text. And please note, I’m doing that without calling anyone an intellectual child or dishonest; none of that bad-mouthing you find necessary or useful.

Jayjay4547 wrote:By your own argument above the process of evolution has been more than novelty generation. Mutation has been followed by testing in a world ruled by logic- and that has led to inscrutable progressive creation Now you try to reduce evolution to “novelty generation”.

Seriously, don't be so hopelessly dishonest.

It should not be necessary in adult discourse to explicitly mention every aspect of something every single time that thing is mentioned in order to avoid being shittily misrepresented as having 'changed one's position' from an earlier paragraph.

I think I've wasted enough time on your cuntish mendacity.

Maybe you aren’t appreciating fully, that I justifiably read your posts as dedicatedly polemical. Not just your calling me a lying cunt, but also when you call creativity “novelty generation”. That is active misdirection. Novelty is easily created: a simple algorithm could produce a novel text string like GTOTHVGWAQ. But the biological creation has produced people who can implement that algorithm on a machine they created. That's not so obviously simple.

And for another thing the slide show misses the point about human origins; by ignoring the significance of our un-beastly apparent vulnerability. A much shorter slide show based on ecology could have told far more:

Slide 1 About 8 million years ago grasslands that used a new more efficient way of using the sun’s energy spread over much of Africa. Two types of primates appeared who were able to access the grasslands resources without paying too high a price to the grassland predators. These primates were several species of baboons and hominins.

Slide 2. Unlike baboons, the small canines of hominins from about 6 million years ago showed that they had replaced the last-resort defensive biting that make most primates dangerous to attack, with hand-weapon use. We don’t know exactly how they defended themselves but it was probably by using sticks to stop a predator, take the initiative from it and confuse it, and then use a large river stone to smash the predator’s skull. The hominins probably fought in groups, like some of their predators.

Slide 3. The more efficiently the hominins protected themselves the more grassland areas they could forage in, in smaller numbers, at times of day and seasons that suited their foraging. That efficiency depended on them being able to handle objects with the force, accuracy and speed equivalent to that of a biting hyena or of alternative prey like the baboons. The hominid genus of Australopiths were highly adapted into that efficiency, with bipedal gait so they could carry weapons while foraging, hands adapted to grasp sticks and stones and a long back to stand taller than a predator.

Slide 4. From about 3 million years ago the efficiency of the australopith stand-off defense was reliable enough for them to develop a hairless sweaty skin that was vulnerable to a bite or scratch, but enabled them to avoid being exhausted by their predators. Their skulls were already protected by the same habit and they were in a position to protect their young during a long period of helplessness. The path was clear for them to develop a larger brain needed for speech.

Slide 5. From about 2.5mya we see our own genus homo broken away from australopithecus and exploiting the opportunities for developing a larger brain and protecting slow-maturing infants. That trend ended about 120 000 years ago with an animal that could rapidly connect words into sentences together and rapidly make sense of sentences. We don’t know quite how this language faculty arose, but it may be connected to the fact that the brain centres of speech and hand control are close to each other, while the warning cries of primates come from the part of their brains that controls emotion.

Slide 6: The human faculty for speech enabled any amount of precise knowledge to be taught and shared between any number of people, enabling large societies to develop with cultures. On the downside, the human ability to counterattack other animals that are themselves prepared to fight, and for access to territorial resources, has led to an endless succession of wars of increasing destructiveness. The biological success of tool-making combined with language has made an imbalance in nature that threatens many other species and even the creative capacity of the planet.

You really think your fantasy deserves treatment on BBC?

If Darwin hadn’t found such a champion in T H Huxley, if Huxley hadn’t been associated with the new model London Universities, or if Darwin hadn’t existed at all only Wallace, or if the Anglican church hadn’t been in such a crisis around that time- then yes, something like what you call my fantasy would have deserved and got onto the BBC web site.

No it would not have deserved BBC treatment because not only is your assertion wrong your dates, when not made up, are all fucked up.

2)You've got human ancestors having small canine teeth before or at about the same time as the chimpanzee human split. Something that is totally fucking ridiculous.

3)You're saying that well before human ancestors became distinguishable from the shared chimpanzee-human ancestor that human ancestors were proficient with tools and weapons. Something that is totally fucking ridiculous.

4)At three million years ago you have weapon use driving the loss of body hair leading bigger brains. Something that is totally fucking ridiculous.

5)At 2.5 million years ago you have what you call our genus breaking away from Australopithecus. Like you think it was something sudden. There was no breaking away, and the concept that there was is only a product of a discontinuos fossil record.

You have "our genus" exploiting the opportunities for developing larger brains. Do you not understand at all how natural selection works? You think that some how a genus or a species guides its evolution?

6)You've got human speech at 120,000 years ago being a big factor in human evolution. The problem with that is that no one knows when human speech as we know it developed.

So, no your fantasy does not deserve anything other that derision. Yours is the ideological approach.

A lot better thought out and expressed than the old shoe I cobbled together here. But in this universe, to answer your question, No. The BBC only puts up origin stories that British society has well chewed over. And that’s how it should be.

It's only you and those of a creation bent that see any of it as an origin story.

I put up that 6 slide text to contradict Tolman’s notion that the 15 slide BBC show necessarily was too short to give a “holistic” picture.

You pulled your 6 slide text out of your fucking ass. You don't know enough about it to even try at something comprehensible, but you go ahead anyway.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher will not say it - Cicero.

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead - Stephen Hawking

tolman wrote:It's only in religious or pseudo-religious contexts that there is a desperate need in some people to believe in 'creation'.

Maybe so, but that need in some to believe in creation has produced in others a reactive tendency to tell the same story as mere change.

No doubt a committed believer in Thunder Gods could try and pretend to themselves that nasty atheist physicists are ideologically committed to explaining thunder and lightning as 'mere' physical phenomena.

The thing is, outside the self-centred wishful thinking of the creationist, there is nothing other than natural change (if 'natural' is taken to include our own species' effects).

It's the creationist who sees natural change as being somehow emotionally insufficient, but there's no more reason for science to try and pander to such feelings than for it to pander to the feelings of believers in Thunder Gods.

If 'mere' reality isn't good enough for some emotional and intellectual children, that's not really science's problem.

Science’s problem is that atheist ideology

You have failed to present a coherent, rigourous definition of this supposed ideology.You have failed to present evidence for it's existence.Most importantly you have failed to adress the fact that atheism, by definition cannot be an ideology.Continued failure to do this things will only demonstrate that you're not acting in a honest manner.I.e. you're still lying Jayjay.

Jayjay4547 wrote: has been using the framework of Darwinian evolution to build an origin story of self creation when the reality is that we have been made by agency greater than ourselves.

You have presented fuck all evidence to support this asinine assertion.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A problem that makes for all mankind and all life on this planet is that that part of the creative agency that is immediately above our status can be hurt, so killing us or what is worse, it might destroy creativity on Earth and turn it permanently into a slave planet. The self-creation origin story blinds its believers to the very existence of this creative agent.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The BBC slide show set out to explain how the supposedly “bizarre” human species came into being.

In fifteen short paragraphs, it was giving a brief look at some selected genetic differences between humans and their ancestors and living close relatives.

It simply wasn't claiming to be a comprehensive and holistic description of human evolution, and it seems only a moron would think or claim that it was.

FFS, the wikipedia page on 'human evolution' is around ten times the size.

If you added the Wikipedia entries on australopithecus, Oldown culture and so on, you could easily get 100 times the length of that slide show. But I showed that one could present a holistic* story in a slide show half as long.

No, stop lying. You dishonestly claimed it was a slide show on the whole of human evolution, even after I corrected you on this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:"Fuck Sake" would have noticed that I was giving the actual question the slide show posed: How did such a bizarre creature evolve?. The question “How” does actually imply a holistic answer- not necessarily exhaustive. Like Thomas Eshuis, you are trying to make out that the slide show had restricted what it asked but actually it restricted its answer.

Stop lying Jayjay.This is the title of the slideshow:The 15 Tweaks That Made Us HumanThis is the context of that question.It's about the 15 most significant, but my no means exclusive genetic mutations that influenced our evolution.

"Respect for personal beliefs = "I am going to tell you all what I think of YOU, but don't dare retort and tell what you think of ME because...it's my personal belief". Hmm. A bully's charter and no mistake."

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s technically your fantasy that an “actual atheist” would present a highly ecology-heavy view of human evolution”. You need to point to such a critter doing that.

I simply point out that just as you search around looking for things you can pretend are evidence for your imaginary ideology, a dishonest creationist could just as easily select the writings of atheist ecologists and claim that their 'excessive concentration' on special interactions was a deliberate atheist reaction diametrically opposing the biblical account of man being a different and superior created being.

Sure, it would be pathetic, and hopelessly intellectually dishonest, but no more so than what you are doing.

Basically, pretty much any scientific account of nature is going to displease intellectual children who want to cling to religious or similar fairy stories.I'm sure one could choose all manner of world religions or pseudo-scientific views of nature and find within them people who think 'science' is out to get them as a result of 'science' not saying what they want it to say, whether or not 'science' had even heard of their stories, let alone considered them as meriting the slightest attention.

You are still speaking without practical example about an imaginary atheist ecologist and an imaginary response from an imaginary creationist. And yet you “are sure one could choose all manner” of something else. What I am doing is practical criticism: drawing particular conclusions from particular text. And please note, I’m doing that without calling anyone an intellectual child or dishonest; none of that bad-mouthing you find necessary or useful.

Still being dishonest Jayjay.You are cherrypicking papers and then twisting them to things you think support your asininse fantasies.Except everytime it's pointed out those papers don't actually say what you think they say or that you've misrepresented them.And pointing out that your statements are dishonest is not badmouthing.

Jayjay4547 wrote:By your own argument above the process of evolution has been more than novelty generation. Mutation has been followed by testing in a world ruled by logic- and that has led to inscrutable progressive creation Now you try to reduce evolution to “novelty generation”.

Seriously, don't be so hopelessly dishonest.

It should not be necessary in adult discourse to explicitly mention every aspect of something every single time that thing is mentioned in order to avoid being shittily misrepresented as having 'changed one's position' from an earlier paragraph.

Nope, it's statement of fact.Instead of an attempt to catogorise it with emotionally loaded terms.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Novelty is easily created: a simple algorithm could produce a novel text string like GTOTHVGWAQ. But the biological creation has produced people who can implement that algorithm on a machine they created. That's not so obviously simple.

Appeal to complexity fallacy.

"Respect for personal beliefs = "I am going to tell you all what I think of YOU, but don't dare retort and tell what you think of ME because...it's my personal belief". Hmm. A bully's charter and no mistake."

I do wish someone would send the memo on athiest ideology. I worry that my belief in God, a god or some gods is absent in the wrong way!

Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion-- Carl Sagan

How can one have an 'ideology' of non-belief? Ideology infers a belief in 'something'.

I have NO BELIEF in the existence of a God or gods. I do not have to offer evidence nor do I have to determine absence of evidence because I do not ASSERT that a God does or does not or gods do or do not exist.

Nebogipfel wrote:I do wish someone would send the memo on athiest ideology. I worry that my belief in God, a god or some gods is absent in the wrong way!

I would have expected someone such as Jayjay4547 could easily explain and provide some evidence of some such ideology. He seems so familiar with the concept.For myself, I shall consider myself an amateur atheist or maybe a renegade atheist or maybe a rebel atheist without a cause for the time being. Do we get a secret handshake with the ideology? Maybe a ring to wear or a special cologne that only truly idealised atheists would recognise? Maybe "smells like absent spirit"?

The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.Mark Twain

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Calilasseia wrote:Oh no. Now he's started an entire thread devoted to this made up shit.

Well, this sort of stuff keeps the forum going and gives us a few good laughs.

I have NO BELIEF in the existence of a God or gods. I do not have to offer evidence nor do I have to determine absence of evidence because I do not ASSERT that a God does or does not or gods do or do not exist.

Jayjay4547 wrote:This claim is that the human origin story has been presented as one of self-creation

Wrong. It's wrong because:

[1] The scientific conclusions, based on the DATA, include the conclusion that the human lineage arose from a prior, non-human lineage. Which on its own destroys your "self-creation" fabrication, because the scientific conclusion is that we weren't "created" at all, rather derived from existing ancestral stock.

[2] Another of those scientific conclusions, again based on the DATA, is that the mutations in our lineage responsible for our distinctive features were acquired, courtesy of the action of testable natural processes over which the acquiring organisms had no control.

[3] Those mutations persisted in our lineage, because said mutations didn't stop those inheriting them from producing descendants. Which should be banally obvious from the observable data.

[4] The scientific conclusions also include conclusions about the ecological interactions our ancestors were likely to engage in, which again destroys your "self-creation" fabrication.

Bullshit. It's actually the other way round. Namely, when scientists started alighting ipon DATA, and that DATA told us that mythological assertions were complete hooey, it was mythology fetishists that reacted to this. A typical reaction being the publication of The Fundamentals by various American mythology fetishists, which laid the foundations upon which modern American corporate creationism was built. In short, the entire creationism industry is a gigantic toddler strop, an infantile tantrun thrown because the DATA doesn't conform to the wishful thinking of people who want their fairy stories to be true. That;s the REAL reactionary response here.

In short, what REALLY happened was that the DATA told us that Genesis was horseshit, and idiot fanboys of this horseshit are too immature to grow up and grow a pair.

Jayjay4547 wrote:in which human beings were made by something greater than themselves

Oh wait, what's the score sheet again?

Number of instances of evidence supporting testable natural processes: several million and growing daily;

Number of instances of evidence supporting mythological magic entities: zero.

As for the idea that the scientific picture doesn't involve things "greater than us", try the fact that the material we're made of was formed inside exploding supergiant stars. Entites for which we have evidence, unlike mythological magic men. Now which is more awe inspiring here, the notion that we're the puppets of some arsehole dictator in the sky dreamt up by superstitious piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads, or that we're the product of the titanic forces involved in supernova detonations?

Jayjay4547 wrote:and which is a basic truth about human origins and the human status.

Poppycock. There is ZERO evidence for a magic man. For that matter, every assertion erected in Genesis about the order of appearance of relevant entities in the history of the universe, the history of Planet Earth, and the history of its inhabitants, is wrong. The DATA tells us that those assertions are wrong. Genesis is nothing more than a piece of bad mythology, cooked up by people who were too stupid to ask themselves the basic questions required for elementary fact checking with respect to numerous entities and phenomena they could observe directly. Such as that piece of later hilarity in Levicitus, where they couldn't be bothered to check the DATA with respect to how many legs anj insect possesses. It's not as if insects are exactly rare in the Middle East, or for that matter members of other invertebrate phyla. Scientists are still discovering new species in Israel today.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It includes responses to posts in the topic "Dialog on Creationists read this"

We'll wait for the DATA to tell us this, shall we?

Jayjay4547 wrote:If Darwin hadn’t found such a champion in T H Huxley, if Huxley hadn’t been associated with the new model London Universities, or if Darwin hadn’t existed at all only Wallace, or if the Anglican church hadn’t been in such a crisis around that time

So many hypotheticals, so little DATA.

Apparently you're unaware of the fact that the notion of relatedness of living organisms began with Linnaeus, not Darwin. It's inherent in his anatomically based taxonomic scheme. The entire Linnaean enterprise, was based upon classifying organisms on the basis that those sharing many anatomical features were more closely related than those not sharing those features. Indeed, the entire concept of nested hierarchies is a Linnaean invention. Where Darwin scored, was that instead of simply treating relatedness of living organisms as a brute fact, as Linnaeus did (because, to be fair, Linnaeus was more interested in cataloguing the biosphere, and establishing a robust means upon which to base that enterprise), he searched for testable reasons for that relatedness. Which he duly found, in the form of common ancestry followed by acquisition of novelty within diverging lineages.

Indeed, Linnaeus found himself coming up against uppity mythology fetishists during his work. Courtesy of the fact that on the basis of shared anatomical features, Linnaeus wanted to classify humans and chimpanzees in the same taxonomic Genus. The reason he didn't was because of uppity supernaturalists wanting to preserve at all costs a fictitious "separateness" for humans. Linnaeus commented on this in a letter to his fellow taxonomist, Johann Georg Gmelin, in a letter from 1747, which can be read in full, as both a translation and in the original Latin, here. Here's the relevant part from the Latin original:

"It does not please (you) that I've placed Man among the Anthropomorpha,[22] but man learns to know himself. Let's not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name we apply. But I seek from you and from the whole world a generic difference between man and simian that [follows] from the principles of Natural History. I absolutely know of none. If only someone might tell me a single one! If I would have called man a simian or vice versa, I would have brought together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to have by virtue of the law of the discipline."

Oh look, NOT scientists "reacting" to Genesis, rather, supernaturalists reacting violently to data that did not conform to doctrine. A precedent that was set long ago when Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake.

Jayjay4547 wrote:then yes, something like what you call my fantasy would have deserved and got onto the BBC web site.

No it wouldn't. Because, wait for it, the DATA would still have prevailed. The DATA flushes your fantasies down the toilet.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A lot better thought out and expressed than the old shoe I cobbled together here. But in this universe, to answer your question, No.

Oh, you mean the REAL WORLD?

Jayjay4547 wrote:The BBC only puts up origin stories that British society has well chewed over.

Er, no. You do realise that several of the genes mentioned in that slide show were only recently dsicovered, and subject to analysis?

No, what should happen is HONEST REPORTING OF THE DATA. Something that creationists loathe with a vengeance when it destroys their doctrinal fantasies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I put up that 6 slide text to contradict Tolman’s notion that the 15 slide BBC show necessarily was too short to give a “holistic” picture.

Oh wait, once again, you've been told what the purpose of that slide show was. Namely, to INFORM US ABOUT SPECIFIC GENES, IN THE HUMAN LINEAGE, THAT HELPED TO SHAPE THAT LINEAGE. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand?

tolman wrote:It's only in religious or pseudo-religious contexts that there is a desperate need in some people to believe in 'creation'.

Maybe so, but that need in some to believe in creation has produced in others a reactive tendency to tell the same story as mere change.

No doubt a committed believer in Thunder Gods could try and pretend to themselves that nasty atheist physicists are ideologically committed to explaining thunder and lightning as 'mere' physical phenomena.

The thing is, outside the self-centred wishful thinking of the creationist, there is nothing other than natural change (if 'natural' is taken to include our own species' effects).

It's the creationist who sees natural change as being somehow emotionally insufficient, but there's no more reason for science to try and pander to such feelings than for it to pander to the feelings of believers in Thunder Gods.

If 'mere' reality isn't good enough for some emotional and intellectual children, that's not really science's problem.

Science’s problem

Science doesn't have a problem, except with people who prefer made up shit to DATA.

The ONLY notion that unites atheists around the world, is the notion that supernaturalists have failed to provide genuine evidential support for any of their assertions about their pet magic entities. That is IT. That notion is again supported on a grand scale by the DATA. Examples of the DATA supporting this notion include:

[1] Complete failure of supernaturalists to achieve, on a global scale, any consensus, with respect to which of the numerous extant mytholgies fabricated by humans is purportedly the "right" mythology, or which mytholoigcal assertions are purportedly the "right" assertions;

[2] Complete failure of adherents of particular mythologies to agree amongst themselves what their mythologies are purportedly telling us;

[3] Complete failure of supernaturalists to provide any DATA to support even the most peripheral of assertions arising from their mytholgies and the doctrine built thereupon, let alone the core, critial assertions;

[4] Complete failure of supernaturalists to provide proper tests that can be performed independently, in order to inform us about the status of their assertions;

[5] Complete failure of supernaturalists to provide any explanation, as to why the scientific endeavour should be so rampantly successful, whilst dispensing completely with mythological assertions about magic entities.

All of the above DATA tells us that supernaturalists have never once provided an atom of support for their assertions, and as a corollary, this core notion isn't an "ideological assertion" on the part of atheists, but an evidentially supported postulate, and the ONLY postulate upon which atheism is based.

Learn this lesson once and for all, JayJay, and stop posting lies and bullshit.

Jayjay4547 wrote:has been using the framework of Darwinian evolution to build an origin story of self creation

Bullshit. Dealt with this fabrication in detail above.

Jayjay4547 wrote:when the reality is that we have been made by agency greater than ourselves.

Where's the evidence for a mythological magic man again? Oh, there isn't any. Game over for your assertion.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A problem that makes for all mankind and all life on this planet is that that part of the creative agency that is immediately above our status

Once again ...

Number of instances of evidence supporting testable natural processes: several million and growing daily;

Number of instances of evidence supporting mythological magic entities: zero.

Jayjay4547 wrote:can be hurt, so killing us or what is worse, it might destroy creativity on Earth and turn it permanently into a slave planet.

JayJay, go and take your fantasies to tinfoilhat.com, where they'll be more appreciated.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The BBC slide show set out to explain how the supposedly “bizarre” human species came into being.

In fifteen short paragraphs, it was giving a brief look at some selected genetic differences between humans and their ancestors and living close relatives.

It simply wasn't claiming to be a comprehensive and holistic description of human evolution, and it seems only a moron would think or claim that it was.

FFS, the wikipedia page on 'human evolution' is around ten times the size.

If you added the Wikipedia entries on australopithecus, Oldown culture and so on, you could easily get 100 times the length of that slide show.

Which is precisely Tolman's point. Or did this elementary concept whoosh past you as well?

Jayjay4547 wrote:But I showed that one could present a holistic* story in a slide show half as long.

No, you showed how it's possible to peddle made up shit in less space.

Jayjay4547 wrote:"Fuck Sake" would have noticed that I was giving the actual question the slide show posed: How did such a bizarre creature evolve?. The question “How” does actually imply a holistic answer- not necessarily exhaustive. Like Thomas Eshuis, you are trying to make out that the slide show had restricted what it asked but actually it restricted its answer.

Bollocks. The slide show, once again, concentrated upon a particular remit. Why is this elementary concept too hard for you to understand, JayJay?

Jayjay4547 wrote:*Holism: a term introduced by General the Right Hon. Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926, in his book Holism and Evolution

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s technically your fantasy that an “actual atheist” would present a highly ecology-heavy view of human evolution”. You need to point to such a critter doing that.

I simply point out that just as you search around looking for things you can pretend are evidence for your imaginary ideology, a dishonest creationist could just as easily select the writings of atheist ecologists and claim that their 'excessive concentration' on special interactions was a deliberate atheist reaction diametrically opposing the biblical account of man being a different and superior created being.

Sure, it would be pathetic, and hopelessly intellectually dishonest, but no more so than what you are doing.

Basically, pretty much any scientific account of nature is going to displease intellectual children who want to cling to religious or similar fairy stories.

I'm sure one could choose all manner of world religions or pseudo-scientific views of nature and find within them people who think 'science' is out to get them as a result of 'science' not saying what they want it to say, whether or not 'science' had even heard of their stories, let alone considered them as meriting the slightest attention.

You are still speaking without practical example about an imaginary atheist ecologist and an imaginary response from an imaginary creationist.

You forget we have long experience of creationist apologetics at work. The aetiology has been extensively studied here. It's simply a particularly florid instance of the aetiology of doctrine centred world views as a whole. Which can be summarised succinctly as follows: "Make some shit up, then pretend that said made up shit equals fact".

Jayjay4547 wrote:And yet you “are sure one could choose all manner” of something else.

Jayjay4547 wrote:By your own argument above the process of evolution has been more than novelty generation. Mutation has been followed by testing in a world ruled by logic- and that has led to inscrutable progressive creation Now you try to reduce evolution to “novelty generation”.

Seriously, don't be so hopelessly dishonest.

It should not be necessary in adult discourse to explicitly mention every aspect of something every single time that thing is mentioned in order to avoid being shittily misrepresented as having 'changed one's position' from an earlier paragraph.

Now watch as Jayjay mindlessly regurigtates the same lies and get's offended when people point this out.

"Respect for personal beliefs = "I am going to tell you all what I think of YOU, but don't dare retort and tell what you think of ME because...it's my personal belief". Hmm. A bully's charter and no mistake."

Jayjay4547 wrote:This claim is that the human origin story has been presented as one of self-creation, in reactive opposition to the Genesis story in which human beings were made by something greater than themselves- and which is a basic truth about human origins and the human status.

Bullshit.The general scientific consensus on evolution is (and seemingly always has been) that humans are one of the products of an extraordinarily complicated process involving all manner of interactions.

Indeed, that's so basic that scientists seem unlikely to see a need to constantly repeat it, especially since few people seem likely to lie and try to pretend that someone failing to constantly repeat the obvious is therefore denying it.That's the thing about scientists (believers and nonbelivers) - they generally assume a default level of sanity and honesty in their audience.

The philosophical issue is whether someone chooses to consider 'evolution' as being a pseudo-person and god-substitute as opposed to a natural process, but that's really not a matter for science.

To me, it seems a basic category error to try and compare 'humanity' and 'evolution' in terms of 'greatness', since the properties typically associated with 'greatness' in humans don't seem sensibly applicable to 'greatness' in nature.

For a start, 'greatness' in humans is essentially a relative term comparing individuals, and in that sense 'greatness' is meaningless in the context of the evolution of everything, since there is only one 'evolution' and one 'nature'.

The use of 'greatness' with regard to humans is in a context where there are explicit goals and conscious decision-making by individuals to do things like 'work hard', 'benefit others', or 'be self-sacrificing', or to cause other people to work together.

'Nature' can't 'benefit others' or 'be self sacrificing' since there are no 'others' to benefit or sacrifice for, since there is only one nature.Nature can't cause 'others' to work together since there are no 'others'.

People might choose to call a volcanic mountain 'bountiful' or 'generous' because it has fertile soils and its topography helps generate rains, but it would be pseudo-religious bollocks to start assigning personality or divinity to the mountain when it is clear that there is no choice involved - the mountain is a pile of rock whose properties unavoidably include fertility and rainfall.

Now, within limits it's fine to indulge in pseudo-religious bollocks and superstition for one's own personal use, but the sane person knows deep down that they are indulging.It would seem to be a significant personal failing to claim that because of one's own wishful thinking, a scientist who took a logical look at what the mountain actually was was being some kind of unbelieving heretic going out of their way to burst one's childish bubble.

Similarly, if one had a pet theory regarding evolution, it would be deeply childish to claim that because that doesn't seem to be a consensus view that that means all of science is in some evil conspiracy - that would seem likely to be paranoid bollocks even if one's pet theory was actually correct, let alone if it wasn't.

Where someone has had a theory which went against the general consensus and was later proved to be right, they don't generally seem to have thrown hissy fits and cried 'conspiracy', rather they manned the fuck up, recognised reality and put things down to a combination of inertia and a lack of killer evidence.But maybe the causality is the other way - the people who throw hissy fits and start blaming everyone else are likely to be the kind of people who come up with bollocks in the first place.

The basic issue seems to be people lacking the intellectual capacity or willingness to understand that if one changes perspective, such as from an organism to a species, or a species to all of nature, it's bogus to assume that the concepts useful in one perspective are necessarily directly applicable to another.That basic mental failing seems to underlie all manner of religious and pseudo-religious woo regarding nature - someone trying to imagine themselves or some imaginary entity as 'nature', moronically overanthropomorphising, and then using the results of that moronic overanthropomorphising as 'evidence' that 'nature' is like some single living being, and then moronically concluding that there is something wrong with anyone not stupid enough to agree, or that disagreement is evidence of a conspiracy.

I don't do sarcasm smileys, but someone as bright as you has probably figured that out already.